A Fantastic Show With A Fantastic Makeover
I first started watching this program somewhere in the Second Season during its initial run on the SyFy Channel at the urging of my wife, who had been an avid viewer since day one. I had seen the Pilot when it was first broadcast, but never watched with regularity (at the time I was working a lot of overtime on Friday nights). I did come away from the Pilot very impressed by what appeared to be a great premise, excellent special effects, and potentially some great characters. Eventually my Friday evening schedule cleared up and once I started watching a couple of episodes I was completely hooked.
There is a definite 4 year story arc here; most of the episodes do tie together as the later seasons demonstrate. I won't elaborate on all the details of the program, mainly because there are many reviews here that do just that. What I will discuss is the quality of the box set that A&E has released, and has done an outstanding job of packaging and remastering the episodes. I...
Review for the Blu-ray: Pulled from PAL video it isn't true HD but it looks very good nevertheless
"Farscape" came at a good time providing a bridgeduring a key time when most science fiction on TV was "Star Trek" or nothing else ("Babylon 5" excepted) and it brought a much needed dollop of humor, fascinating storylines and great characterizations. It's true that the series presents a hodge podge of ideas that were successful in other shows from "Star Trek" to "The X-Files" but what was great as with all things that are an amalgamation of other ideas from other shows was how it was put together.
"Farscape: The Complete Series" is, well, somewhat incomplete. While it includes all four seasons it doesn't include the mini-series "Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars" due to licensing issues with Lion's Gate (which released that title)so you'll need to keep your DVD set for that until the latter is released on Blu-ray.
The Blu-ray presentation for "Farscape" suffers a bit from the fact that it was produced prior to studios thinking of high definition. The show was shot...
A nice set, but it won't be replacing my ADV discs
First of all, this is a nice, and very convenient set, well worth the money. If you've never bought any Farscape episodes before, or you have limited space to store a collection, then this set is probably for you. That said, there are some caveats. I did a back to back comparison of the original ADV discs and the newer ones in this set. There's three things that jump out.
1. The bit rate is about 2/3 of the ADV discs. I expected this to be lower since A&E is squeezing about twice the number of episodes onto a disc - ADV put two episodes while this set piles on four per disc. The only way to do this is to compress the programs more. Quality-wise, the image is still remarkably good, and I didn't hear any differences in the audio quality.
2. Unlike the ADV discs, these are not progressive scan encoded - the video is interlaced. Some players don't handle interlaced video properly when they try to convert it to progressive scan output, and jittering can appear in...
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